a case for digital strategy at ualr

Why digital?A case for bringing us together online

Why should I care about digital?

In a word:

STUDENTS

In two words:

MORESTUDENTS

In three words:

RETAIN MORE

STUDENTS

What is digital?

Digital is everywhere we turn.

And nowadays, it is where students turn first.

Digital is everywhere:

● It’s the way the world operates now.

vertical

horizontalDigital is

Organizations are still

The new paradigm is horizontal

● Communication is omni-directional and across all demographics (grandmothers are on Facebook)

● Communication happens where it happens (phones, tablets, etc.) and in multiple mediums, channels, and demographics

● It is social, conversational, and raw – not cleansed and curated

The old pair of dimes of one-directional communication is no longer valid

● Communicating with one another and with UALR in the social sphere

● Creating reviews in Google

● Sharing experiences on and off campus

● Not subject to our vertical hierarchy

The new pair of dimes: face-to-face-to-face communication, everywhere, all of the time.

Are we listening and are we a part of that conversation?

Students are:

What have we done about it?

● Establish a full-fledged digital team that knows about content, code, design, data, social, and marketing

● One-on-one training

● Report findings

● Integrated analytics across all channels

● Monitor peers and competitors for benchmarking

● Optimized content for organic search success

Improving the online experience

Adopt practices that:

• Find broken student experiences

• Fix them

• Measure the results

Adopt practices that:

• Make good student experience behavior the norm

• Create a consistent framework for measure quality

Adopt practices that will:

• Give organization more sophisticated toolkit for student experience

• Share data learnings across the university

Adopt practices that will:

• Help organization define experience that is truly unique by revealing unmet student needs, re- framing student problems, and re- thinking ecosystem

Adoption path courtesy of Ben Cooper

Insights across all channels

New tools for competitive analysis

Organic search = Free

What else are we doing about it?

● Student-centered redesign of the homepage and other top-level sites

● Responsive design for mobile● Using data to create personas and

navigational cues● “Selfie-centered” marketing to engage

students on their devices

● Migrations and sustainability of websites

Redesign: Admissions site overhaul

Responsive: Mobile usage up 50%

Admissions usable on many devices

Marketing selfies: MyFuture@Work

The digital path

Funnel courtesy of Ben Cooper

Migrations: Moving to 2013

Why are we migrating?

● Better content

● Better organization of content

● Better promotion of YOUR content

● More functionality, flexibility, features

● More support

How can we help you?

● Training

● Digital strategy and tactics

● Social and marketing campaigns

● Site migrations

● Content promotion

● Analytics and insight

How do I get started?

Contact us at ualr.edu/digital/

Start the strategic process with Jennifer at jcgodwin@ualr.edu

To receive the monthly digital report, please add “monthly report” to the request at:ualr.edu/digital/contact